across to the far bank. He continued to make his way south and hid in the woods along the road to Espinho, returning to the city only after five days of hiding. Twice during his escape, a regiment of Gallic soldiers came within a hundred yards of him, and twice he lay facedown in the soil, silently reciting Hebrew prayers for the soul of the youth he had killed.
My beloved Fanny and Zebra were not so fortunate. I never saw either of them again.
I would wager that on the morn of the great battle, Papa let them out into our garden, as I found a plate of bones there, most probably some chicken he had scrounged. When French soldiers broke the hinge of our front door, both dogs would have breathed fire like Scottish dragons — and been summarily shot, I have no doubt.
But I found no blood. Possibly it had seeped into the garden soil. Their bodies must have been tossed onto dung heaps with the rest of the fallen and set ablaze.
I only hope they were not made to suffer.
Mother and I left our rural refuge for Porto on the Third of April, when news reached us of the sacking of the city. As there were no barges to take us downriver, we set out on foot. I would never have believed Mama would be able to walk such a distance — sixty miles, at least — but she was driven onward by terror, as though a burning metronome were beating inside her. Every day we walked from cockcrow to midday, at which time, with the sun highest in the sky, we rested by the side of the road, in the spring shade afforded by pine trees. Then we continued on till sundown, finding shelter in farmhouses and barns.
The peasants we met were kind, displaying the generosity one often encounters by accident. One old woman sat in a field munching raw cabbage and watching the night sky with me. She told me that the stars were not hunters, as Midnight had said, but rather seeds scattered by God. The earth itself was one such seed.
Gazing at the Milky Way, I wondered where Violeta was. I dearly hoped that she had escaped Portugal to America.
Eleven days after we had started out, we spied the Clerics Tower from a clearing several miles outside the city. Mother and I burst into tears.
Our house had been ransacked and all my mother’s porcelain destroyed. The skylight in the Lookout Tower had been shattered, and rain had soaked through to the upper floor of the house.
We hadn’t the heart to dig under the rosebushes, so we were unaware that our silver and jewelry were safe. The pianoforte was undamaged, still buried under books.
Grandmother Rosa’s house remained safely boarded up, and Senhor Benjamin, who had returned home by now, told us that he had heard she was still in Aveiro and that all was well.
Father was missing. Mama and I searched frantically for anyone who might have seen or spoken to him, and we finally found a neighbor up the street who’d spotted him leaving our house at dawn on the morning of the Twenty-Ninth. No one saw him again after that.
Two days later, I learned of his fate from a young sergeant in the Loyal Lusitanians, one of the lucky few to survive the cannon fire at the Bishop’s Palace. His name was Augusto Duarte Cunha, and I found him in one of the overcrowded wards at St. Anthony’s Hospital, where he was recovering from a bullet wound in his chest.
With his foreign looks and accent, my father struck a memorable figure, and the sergeant knew exactly who I meant as soon as I started to describe him.
“I remember him well,” Cunha said, inviting me to pull up a chair to his cot.
Holding tight to hope, I asked, “Sergeant, do you know if … if my father survived the French attack?”
“No, I’m afraid not, son,” he replied solemnly. “I was with him when the end came.”
“You … you saw him die?”
“Yes, I was right beside him.”
I fought to keep from crying but in the end had to dash out to the corridor, where I hid my face against the wall. When I returned to the ward, the sergeant shook my hand and said, “I liked your father a great deal, John. He was a brave man. I’m sorry.”
“Please … please tell me everything you can about his last hours.”
“I will tell you what I know, but you have to understand, the French attacks came one after another, and we were far outnumbered. Time for conversation was scarce.”
“Father fought beside you?”
“Yes, he had a pistol — an antique of sorts. Not much good, I’m afraid. Though that didn’t stop him from trying. Your father proved himself a good shot, but he was out of practice.”
The sergeant then described the battle at the Olival Gate and how my father had been grazed with a bullet in his leg. “A short time later,” he said, “when the fighting moved to near the Bonfim Church, your father put down the musket he had taken from a dead soldier and helped nurse the wounded men. He proved himself an able orderly. For the young lads, having an older man attend to them was reassuring.”
“This was all on the Twenty-Ninth?”
“That’s right, John.”
“And when you were able to speak to him, what did you talk about?”
“I remember that the first thing I asked him was what made him decide to live in Portugal.”
“And what did he say?”
“Love and wine.” The sergeant laughed. “I didn’t believe him at first, but he said it was the absolute truth. Your father said his gods were Venus and Bacchus.”
“He worked for the Douro Wine Company, but he wanted his own vineyard — and he wanted me to join him. He married my mother shortly after coming to Portugal. They were very much in love.”
“He spoke of her, John.”
“What … what did he tell you?” I asked fearfully.
“Your father said he had a good friend who was always trying to turn lead into silver. ‘Sergeant,’ he told me, ‘I’ve done just the opposite with my marriage.’ I asked what he meant, and he told me he’d made a mess of things with your mother. John, I think he confessed that to me because we all knew we might not live to see another day. He made me promise to value my wife and children above all else.”
“What else did he say?”
“Later, after we’d retreated to the Bishop’s Palace, we spoke once more. Your father said something odd: ‘Perhaps I’ve passed the test after all.’”
“What test?”
Sergeant Cunha considered my question. “He wouldn’t say, son. He just said that when you came back from upriver he would take you to Amsterdam as he’d promised. He was thinking of taking you to Constantinople too. He said you had a grandfather from there and ancestors going back for many centuries. He gave me to understand that he was planning a grand tour of Europe. ‘When we’re done, we’ll all go to Scotland,’ he said. He wanted to take you up to the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle and look out across the entire city. ‘I want to stand with my family as high as we can and let my son see where we come from.’”
“Did he say anything else?”
“He repeated that he needed to take you from Portugal. You needed to get out of ‘the cage’ he’d made for you, as he put it, which I thought peculiar, but he explained that he wanted you to see something of the world, to know there was a life beyond Porto. He said he’d failed to show you that, but he would make it up to you now. He spoke with great determination and hope, I would say.”
“And then?”
“A few minutes later he took a shot to his right temple. Be thankful that he didn’t linger.”
“He died instantly?”
“Yes.”
The sergeant meant well in telling me this, I’m sure, but it was of no comfort. He told me then that the bodies of the men who had fought at the Bishop’s Palace, including Papa’s, were dumped by French soldiers in a pile in front of the cathedral and set ablaze.
“Think well of your father. He died a brave man.”
“Yes, but in dying … in dying he failed the test.”
“Failed? I think not, John. You’ve never been in a war, but let me tell you something: All experienced soldiers
